Xenotopias and the Australian Gothic

A xenotopia, according to landscape writer Robert Macfarlane, is an uncanny or unsettling landscape, an out of place place. From the Greek: xeno - strange or different, and topos - place.

Ah finally, I thought when I read this. Now I have a word for those odd unsettling places, those quickening borderlands that I'm drawn to, whose ancestral scars seem sown into the country. I would argue that places described as xenotopias say more about the visitor; that it is the visitor and not the place, who feels uneasy.

That said, Country can hold events in its body, the same way human ancestors can pass down physical and emotional manifestations of trauma. I believe in this. Blaze Kwaymullina wrote a beautiful essay on ancestral scarring here: Country Roads, Take Me Home; Prisons, Movement and Memory.

 

The academic writing I've read on the Australian Gothic tends to focus on the English colonial experience in Australia first, of trying to navigate Country that felt threatening and was populated with fabulous beasts.The swans were black instead of white and trees shed their bark, not their leaves. Massive granite bosses stood sentinel, reminiscent of European pagan sites. If this country and its beasts didn't kill them, it would oppress, impede, baffle and terrify the protagonists. The ghosts would rise up to strike them down.  

I think that writers still use those ideas for historical fiction, contemporary and even futuristic dystopian drama, using landscape as a major motivating force. (The Sound has been described as Australian Gothic.) Tasmanian writers, artists and film makers do the Gothic brilliantly. In fact I think the Tasmanian Gothic is in a class all of its own. A major motivator is the landscape, swathing a silent, wounded history of the island.

                                                 

Last night I dreamed of the sea eagle. It looked down at me from the spar of a power pole on the overpass into the city. In the morning when I awoke at the inlet it was from the marri tree at the water’s edge that the eagle regarded me. It looked sanguine, interested as I called in its own eerie language. Later I saw the bird cruising the shoreline, hunting, wings tilted up like a dancer’s fingers, as it does every day. I called again but the eagle ignored me. (from my story Living at Clarkie's Camp, out in November)

At the inlet there are myriad Gothic tropes: monster dogs circling my house, cathedrals of trees dripping bark and a memory of rain, a sense of isolation and often discomfort. There is an intense, cold stilling at certain times of the day. Even the birds stop calling. It feels as though nature, though it cares nothing for me ('here lies one whose name was writ in water'), is not only obliterating its own history but holding onto it, layering bones, humus and earth stars over the death, decay and rebirth. Out in the middle of the inlet lie the fossilised stumps of enormous trees, dead for millennia. Fungi feed on the living. The tree I call my Gateway Guardian is burled to a grotesque disfigurement from centuries of insect attack.

Here are the ghosts from the past. Here lived Clarke, hoping to hide from the people who wished him dead. Here are the young women who went into the night forest to hunt wild pigs after a funeral. Here are the wise, funereal crows and shrieking black cockatoos, the black swans that gossip as they fly. Here lives the hermitess, the woman in the tower. Here is the line of stoic weatherboard shacks facing to the sea, holding their own histories.

It feels like a Borderlands, a space in between. Sometimes I jokingly call the place where I live Winterfell and the name is met with a ready, dour nod. The inlet, the islands within and the country  are fiercely loved by the shack-dwellers who know the place intimately. And yet they say that some 'strange things have gone on around here.' 
The country is eerie and beautiful and easy to become obsessed with.

I feel that this place, this xenotopia, is not finished with me yet.